I just did a D-U and it was successful... Python OK as far as I can tell... There was on interesting note in that aptosid held back on a Python Cairo? package. many others installed.

A little history about 3 days ago hplip and other hp printing packages were removed and the printer hp2605dn lost its color capabilities. I tried to compile a custom hp printer driver (I have in the past) but it depended on some legacy (lenny... bsd and cupsys packages so I fiddled for a while with temporary repositories and looked for the packages... gave up when it looked like I was digging a hole were I did not want one) But I remembered it was trying to set up hplip-3.11.3a but stopped at the last element (sh build, from a network online automatic build from HP looking for something very obscure, a package not in a known repository... I thought it wise to wait a day for more info. so I aborted that process. (I do have a nice lookin folder now with a lot of HP python scripts regarding hplip 3.11.3a in the /usr/share right next to hplip 3.11.3 which came in tonight

I removed the legacy repository's and went back to aptosid, experimental, and non free contributor.

during today's D-U everything came into place and the hplip3.11.3 was in place and the python additions as well.

All is OK now. sorry if this is not technical enough. I am still not really a code guru by any stretch of imagination. Just a determined user who believes in aptosid the great.

and... when packages are removed during d-u and you lost features you need,
the solution in general is not to compile your custom software, but downgrading the offending packages,
and reinstall the removed packages with the feature...

and... when packages are removed during d-u and you lost features you need,
the solution in general is not to compile your custom software, but downgrading the offending packages,
and reinstall the removed packages with the feature...

In looking at the issue... you are right, muchan. Should I move it or do nothing with the post, it looks like the problem was solved.
Like so many people I sometimes think I know how to go around a problem when in the long term, patience will work better.
Thank you.

I just ran successful d-u on two machines, first a Toshiba NB205 netbook 32-bit system, and second my desktop i7-950 64-bit system. They both have default repos plus frickelplatz and the debian kde experimental snapshots repo.

python-cairo is held back by apt. There were no packages to be removed. Upgraded packages included grub-common, hplip, chromium-browser and others. No ill effects on either system.